I recalled that the people who actually wrote Wine had certainly called it an emulator, and so was curious why they had stopped.
#Emulator mac wine windows
Many years ago, probably around 2005 or so, I got tired of seeing threads on comp.os.linux.advocacy where someone would ask about the Linux equivalent to Windows program X, someone would mention that X works great under emulation with wine, and someone would jump in to say the Wine is not an emulator (and usually also manage to say "Windoze" or "Losedoze", refer to Microsoft as "M$" or "M$FT", and of course tell the first poster that it is "GNU/Linux", not "Linux"). They were probably posts in in the late '90s if anyone with better search skills wants to have a go at it). (I once had sources for the claims in this and the preceding paragraph but did not save them, and have not been able to rediscover them. If Wine was called an emulator many people would assume that programs running under Wine would be massively slower than those same programs running on a real Windows system. Those emulators tended to be slow, which led most users to make the unjustified assumption that emulation necessarily implied slowness. The other was that most users had only encountered emulators that emulated hardware (e.g., emulators that emulated old gaming systems or old 8-bit personal computers). It could also be used as a library that could be linked with Windows source that was compiled on Unix in order to make a stand-alone Unix binary of a Windows program. One was that Wine could be used for more than just running Windows binaries on Unix. The dropping of calling Wine an emulator appears to have taken place for two reasons.
#Emulator mac wine free
The 981108 release notes say "This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator", and the 981211 release notes say "This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix". Use whichever one you like best".Ĭalling Wine an emulator was dropped between releases 981111. According to the Wine FAQ from late 1997 : "The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. By 1997, though, the "not an emulator" meaning was in use as an alternative. He liked "whine" but felt it was too long.Īs far as I can tell, nothing ever came of that 1993 post. His original thought when he started the project was to name it "winemu", but didn't like that and shortened it to "wine", which led him to "whine" and "whinny". That suggestion was by Bob Amstadt in a post where he also explained how the name "wine" came about. The first suggestion for the "Wine Is Not an Emulator" language was made in 1993, over concern that "Windows Emulator" might run into trademark problems with Microsoft. The change was largely due to essentially marketing. It originally was officially called an emulator. The Wine is not an emulator thing has an interesting history. Wine is a great project, and truly 'is not an emulator'.